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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7506594" data-attributes="member: 42582">One system that I play and GM - Burning Wheel - charges PC-build resource points for relationships. These are cheaper if they are close family (and hence, everything else being equal, looming larger in the life of the PC) and cheaper if they are enemies rather than friends (and hence, everything else being equal, hostile to rather than supportive of the PC).One thing the player is paying for when purchasing a relationship is the focus of the fiction: the GM is obliged to incorporate relationships into the game. By spending the additional points required for the PC to be a friend rather than an enemy, the player is paying (i) for the GM not to have the character oppose the PC, and (ii) for the prospect that adversity in the game (as established by the GM) will include his/her PC's commitments to friends and family being called into question.In its details this is nothing like the system [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] described, but I don't find it odd that a RPG should include rules that allow a player to direct the GM as to how a certain bit of background may be used. I certainly think the suggestion that it's either open-ended for the GM to decide, or else "fan fiction", is wrong.I'm sure that you are accurately describing the typical way of playing 5e. But that approach to NPCs seems largely independent of the other components of the game, and I doubt that 5e would break in some fashion if a different approach was taken by a table. When I GMed AD&D, the players generally controlled their PCs' henchmen. It didn't cause any issues.I don't think I would enjoy a game in which (i) the party needed henchmen/NPC allies to have a chance of successfully engaging the scenario the GM presents (which can easily be the case in AD&D if you have a small-ish group of players), and (ii) the GM insisted on running those NPCs. I see it as the GM's job to provide the fictional situations that the players engage, not to pose challenges to his/her own NPCs!These posts seem to run together two completely distinct things - is my character bound by obligations and/or connections to someone/something else and does the GM get to decide stuff about the content of those obligations and the nature of those connections?When I started a 4e campaign about 10 years ago I told the players that each PC had to have a loyalty to something or someone (I got three Raven Queen devotees, a feypact warlock whose patron was Corellon, a cleric of Kord committed to opposing the Bane-ites of the Black Eagle Barony, and a dwarf devoted to proving his worthiness by the standards of the dwarven hold he came from). But it would never occur to me that I could tell those players what is required to honour the Raven Queen, or Kord, or the Black Mountain Dwarfhold. I will (and have) frame situations that push the players to answer those questions, but it's not my job to provide answers. (As it happens, each of the Raven Queen devotees has a different view about what is required to honour their mistress.)As a player in a Burning Wheel game, I play a knight of a religious order (the Knights of the Iron Tower) who is obliged to honour the precepts of his order as well as his noble family. I expect the GM to put those commitments to the test. I would quit the game if the GM tried to tell me what those commitments required. (When my PC encountered a demon, and stood against it without relenting although I had no chance to beat it, the GM was - I think - genuinely surprised. That was me deciding what my character's obligations demanded of him. The demon retreated - it had better ways to spend its limited time on this world then killing a largely irrelevant knight - and the GM determined that my character gained an infamous reputation in the hells as a demon-foe, which will influence future reactions of demons that he encounters. That's the sort of GM decision-making that I regard as completely appropriate.)100x these things. Which relates to the approach to PC-obligations as well. If I'm playing a knight of a holy military order, I want to decide what my character has to do. I'm not interested in the GM telling me that. But I want the GM to present me with situations where being a knight of a holy military order matters!And that's not the only example. My PC has a wizard companion (paid for at PC building). My PC has a belief that he must protect Aramina. Aramina has a belief that s/he does not need Thurgon's pity. I expect the GM to frame situations where these things will matter, and probably come into conflict.Suppose Aramina does something that, from Thurgon's religious point of view, is an affront - but also puts her into danger (eg she enters a forbidden shrine). That will be a challenge for Thurgon to deal with, which it would be completely fair game for the GM to bring about. But if the GM even began to try and tell me what decision is the right one for Thurgon in such circumstances, or adjudicated the situation with an eye to there being a right decision, that would spoil the game for me.This one is interesting. Over the past few years I've mostly been GMing a few systems that are mechanically lighter than 4e, and they make it possible to get through more fiction in a session than 4e normally does. While I miss some of the epic grandeur of 4e, I've found it interesting and enjoyable to get through fiction at a rate that is closer to that of a movie or TV show. (Though still not that rapid, I don't think.)So I wouldn't say I have a firm preference one way or the other here, except that - and on this I think we probably do agree - I want the fiction to matter to play. I'm not much interested in backdrop for its own sake, nor in "filler" material in play. One concrete example: when at the end of the first session of my Classic Traveller campaign the PCs arrived on a planet with a corrosive atmosphere, with their ship carrying an ATV, and two of them having Vacc Suit skill; with the possible goal of heading to a different planet with a breathable but disease-ridden atmosphere; then (to self quote from a write-up of that session) I became:(As it happened, in the second session they left the domed city of the corrosive-atmosphere world in their ATV; and in the third session they were out of the ATV in their vacc suits staging an assault on an enemy outpost; and one of the PCs did suffer a vacc suit incident that exposed him to the atmosphere, although he was able to survive by entering the enemy complex after stealing an unruptured suit from a dead enemy.)</blockquote>

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